Time Inc.
even bought a house in The Villages, named it the "D-Shack," and will
spend a year here, hopefully digging up something more inspired than
what they've put out so far. Hipster journalists have come here to
write about how other hipster journalists are coming here (i.e. ViceMagazine's
"Something, Something, Something, Detroit" piece). A local
blogger even created "Assignment Detroit: The Drinking Game" to pass
the time while reading all the Detroit stories.

I recently overheard someone say, with disdain, "Why is everyone interested in Detroit all of a sudden?"

Really?
You don't know? How heavy is that rock you live under? How dark is that
hole? It's obvious: Detroit is an easy story. It's a journalist's wet
dream. When two of the former "Big Three" file for bankruptcy, the
unemployment rate is nearing 30 percent, and corruption and government
go together like Sweet Lou and Trammell, it's a story.

But not everyone's taking the low-hanging fruit. Model D
sought out a collection of journalists -- all from across the pond --
who reached beyond the bottom branches and found more to the Detroit
story.

Forget the clichés

"Basically,
forget about the clichés. Detroit is not all about the car companies
going own the drain," says the German, Steffan Heuer. "There are
interesting things in small pockets and people are moving (to Detroit)."

Heuer has written for a number of German publications. He's currently the U.S. correspondent for the German business magazine Brand Eins, as well as a contributor to TheEconomist. Recently he did a piece for the German business journal 1585 about Detroit.

"The
topic (of the issue) was opposites -- things that have gone from the
top to the bottom or the bottom to the top," he says. And that is
Detroit, at its face value. However, Heuer says, before he even dropped
in on the city, he started to find evidence that Detroit's story hasn't
been given its fair shake.

"There is a lot of anecdotal
evidence," he says about Detroit's push away from decline. "I'm not
saying the streets are paved (in) gold and that the jobs are coming
back. And if you look at the stats, it doesn't look good. But if you
look at unused potential, the space, the artists, it has (more of that)
than a lot of these places that are rebirthing have."

Heuer says
the decline is amazing and rapid and visible -- all things journalists
love. The ruin fascination -- or ruin porn, as some call it -- will
definitely draw people in, but "in that there are amazing crops of
resurgence."

He likens Detroit to a de-cored apple, surrounded
by the more affluent suburbs. But, while here, he found people trying
to stitch it back together.

"Culturally, Berlin can be similar,"
he says. "After the wall fell it was a place you could do anything, do
what you couldn't do in other places. There was space. You could start
a theater, or an underground bar. This wasn't possible in London or
Paris." In Detroit, it's all possible.

Open to anything

"I
felt that anything could happen, basically. Paris is great but it's so
structured, so many rules. In Detroit, it was like you could start over
again," says the Brit, Susan Connie Marsh, art director and editor for
the Paris-based art and fashion magazine Under The Influence. "It felt like I was five again. It seemed a little dangerous but completely open to anything."

Marsh's magazine is dedicating an entire issue to Detroit. That's why she was
here. She says it's not going to be a guidebook, or a history book.
It's going to showcase Detroit's creatives -- writers, artists,
musicians -- and that's it.

"It was very beautiful," she says of
her time in the city. "Walking down the street, on one block, I could
hear traffic, city noise, the next block was a field and all I could
hear were insects."

Marsh traipsed around the city for a few
weeks. She didn't know too much about Detroit before she got here. She
knew the music, she knew it was considered rough, but she suspected
it'd be similar to her own hometown, industrial Sheffield back in
England. "I had a feeling it was going to be great, and it was better
than I would have (ever) imagined," she says.

The whole story

"Detroit
has an incredible amount of potential," says the Italian, Emanuele
Bompan, a journalist for the daily environmental paper Terra, and a weekly magazine called Left, both based in Italy.

Bompan
didn't come to Detroit to do a piece specifically about the city. Yet,
when he got here, he knew the whole story would be here in Detroit.

"The
first thing I saw was an old train station," he says. "It was so
fascinating, a real landmark of the city. It has the potential to
really attract people. People in Italy would die to see something like
that. Sure, we have a lot of Roman stuff, but nothing like that."

Michigan
Central's decaying beauty is an obvious first stop, but Bompan went
further into the city, which, he says, a lot of journalists fail to do.

"There are very interesting phenomena happening in Detroit," he
says. "We know Detroit from the TV: industry gone to wreck, nothing but
poor people. But there are a lot of people willing to change the city.
There is a chance here. People are building the city not municipally,
not with politics. It's young people, dedicated workers making their
chances and space in Detroit."

Struggle and inspiration

"Detroit is in layers," says one of the Dutch, Jacqueline Maris, a radio journalist for Netherlands-based VPRO Radio.
She was in town, along with the other Dutch, photojournalist Daimon
Xanthopolous, recording a three-part program about Detroit. "There
isn't one moment in history for its decline, or one episode. There
are different layers of decay or closure. But flowers seem to blossom
in the ruins. And Detroiters are not waiting for the city of Detroit to
come to (their) rescue.

"There are a lot of stories in Detroit,"
says Xanthopoulous. "On one side the decline of Detroit is very visible
and journalists look for this crisis. And there is an amazing struggle
happening in Detroit. But there is also incredible inspiration in the
city. The people behind the bar -- they are artists; they are trying to
make stuff with empty buildings. The creative people are feeling the
negativity and trying to change that through art. "

But, you
can't escape some of Detroit's realities. These two, Maris and
Xanthopoulous, were robbed back in April while recording and shooting
in the Brewster Projects. "I expected to get robbed, but that's not the
point of the story," Xanthopoulous says.

"It was a shocking
experience but it doesn't (factor) into my conclusion of Detroit,"
Maris says. "I'm open to the city and a lot of people in these
situation, who are trapped, still love their city."

The project
they put together documented the struggle of the city and, as
Xanthopoulous puts it, they tried to put a face to the crisis. Their
piece was entered into and won a European radio award last month.

Something, something

The
problems of Detroit aren't lost on anyone. These four subjects aren't
blind to the ills of Detroit (especially the two who were robbed) but, at the same time, they also aren't
drunk off potential. The city is in a financial crisis. The abandonment is glaring. The lack of vision coming from local leaders is frightening.

"I
got complete silence from anyone in the city," Heuer says. He called
city department after city department and no one called back to respond
to his media requests. "It was all private organization that reached
out. The Cooleys" -- Phil of Slows fame and Ryan from O'Connor Real
Estate and Development -- "and Diane Van Buren in Indian Village, they
called back. … They were all private organizations, private residents,
and these types of groups reviving Detroit."

The city's
leadership needs to be part of the picture if Detroit is going to
really rebound, he says. "These are small drops in a huge bucket.
Without public funding it'll be a hard road. Cities in Europe that have
rebounded all had the support of the government and a vision to fix
them. Without a very substantial public commitment, change will be
hard."

With that said, Heuer's on his way back.

"I've
convinced my wife to come to Detroit for a weekend," he says. "We're
going to look at houses. Not for speculation but for living. If I'm
writing about this great experiment, I might as well live in it."